I originally read the English version that was translated from Polish>French>English, probably a couple of times over the years, and I've just finished with the Audiobook of the new translation, direct into English.

I think normally I'd not be too bothered about particular translations, I'm not a fussy or very critical scifi reader tbh, it's mostly just escapism and enjoying new concepts that keeps me coming back for more scifi - but in Solaris' case I was wondering...

Since some of what makes it work so well (for me) is a certain vagueness and bafflement about what was going on at certain points - and really as a central point about the ineffability of 'the Alien*'. I think it pervades the whole book enough for it to have not been purely an artefact of the translation, but that the double translation might well have added to that - added a sense of dislocation and frustration and confusion...maybe?

Now... having tried the new version, I'm none the wiser. ...the mysterious vagueness bit didn't seem to be there as much, but perhaps it just can't be for me now that I'm overly familiar with it, maybe it's because it was an audio book, maybe because I know the story so well, maybe because I've seen both movies since reading the original English version...too many variables.

Thoughts? Anyone else read both recently, or if you've just read the new one, do you know what I'm talking about, or am I talking gibberish.

(ie: you don't feel the author has just left stuff unexplained out of laziness or that he's just told you something is unexplainable and moved on (un-satisfyingly), rather that he's dragged you through the thought process to the point where you can reach the same conclusion the characters have reached, that it is just inexplicable on some level)

Native Polish speaker here and a huge fan of Lem. Never read Solaris in English, but I can tell you that even in Polish, it is sometimes a nightmare to understand what is going on. Solaris is by far one of his most "out there" works.

Though it's been a few years since I've read it, it definitely seems that Lem wanted to create a sense of confusion - the human inability to understand Solaris both psychologically and physically. The book in Polish definitely feels vague, confusing, and creates fleeting moments of understanding that only reinforce the general feeling of bafflement.

Not necesarilly - we usually read just some short stories by Lem, there is no book written by him that is "lektura" or oblifatory lecture if you prefer it this way.

Lem is a cornerstone of both Polish and worldwide sci-fi. He's definetely the most popular sci-fi author in Poland - and sci-fi is a big deal out here. We have a lot of great authors and domestic science fiction is far more popular than imports from e.g. USA. We know and love Herbert, Asimov, Clarke etc. But our own writers are really better known - with a special mention of Lem and Zajdel. Also Russian sci-fi is popular (Strugacki brothers!).

Why sci-fi was extremely popular in communist countries? In 19th century we've had a trend in literature that is called positivism - those were mostly alegorical novels that tried to introduce patriotism and organic work. They coulnd't be direct because of censorship. Sci-fi was the same - it was about important social and political issues that couldn't be brought up openly because of the nature of the sick system we (or in my case my parents) lived in.

There are some works of western sci-fi authors that are really inteligent, Asimov was a genius in a socio-historical commentary, but sci-fi in Polish literature was mainly a cloak which was supposed to cover up political message.

Cool, thanks for that. It was only a handful of people I talked to about him, so it's unsurprising that I got an incomplete impression. I'm also a big fan of Polish films, so perhaps the eye-rolling had more to do with the fact that I was so often going on about how great I think Polish art and literature is. I'm like some weird annoying fanboy. :) Sigh. I wish more things were translated to English, or even better, that I could understand Polish.

Yes, you people do have a minority complex! That's a good way to put it. I like to think my raw enthusiasm for so many things Polish helped a few people I met there feel a little more pride in their country. Well, I'm sure 'pride' is an exaggeration, but you know what I mean. ;) Ha, that comment reminded me of the time I met Jerzy Stuhr and babbled on like an idiot about how great I think his films (and Polish films in general) are. He almost managed not to laugh. :) I mean, he's such a big star, and he still had the same dismissive attitude as most other Poles.

I googled Zajdel right after reading your post. :) Very disappointing there's only one translation... but I will track it down and read it.

Sigh. I really want to go visit Poland again now. I just have to figure out how to buy people drinks. No one would let me pay, even people I didn't know gave me the "No, no! You're a guest here, you cannot pay!" The usual "You bought this round, I'll get the next." thing didn't work very well at all. I found it very difficult to thank people for their hospitality. Maybe something to do with that minority complex again? ;)

It's pretty normal to buy drinks for friends or girls (I've spent a shitload of money this way) but yeah, I'd feel uncomfortable if a foreigner would've wanted to pay for my beer. And this has got more to do with pride - "I'm not poor, I can manage paying for my own bills!"

Well, in school I had to read "Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie" ("Tales about pilot Pirx", or smth). And that was completely obligatory in 4th grade. I hated it just like everyone in my class. Fast forward 20 years and I'm a huge fan of Lem. I still hate this one book, though, it seems to me that they just chose the worst one, a boring space opera. Probably because 4th graders wouldn't appreciate some of his better works. But why they give Lem to 4th graders is beyond me.

But that's the same response people will give you here re: Great Gatbsy, Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Rings, Catcher in the Rye - all great books, but being forced to read them when you're a rebellious teenager doesn't work out.

Yeah, the whole book is intentionally vague at times. That's the whole point, Lem is doing it on purpose. Solaris is incomprehensible, baffling. It's also a bit of a modern metaphor for transcendence and numinous (Rudolf Otto and "ganz andere" and all that stuff). It gets a lot more fun if you're just superficially familiar with metaphysics. It's also a lot of fun if you've read Jorge Luis Borges.

The Strugatski brothers also wrote about "the incomprehensible alien". There's a whole tradition there.

I'm learning that even though i quite liked Lem's stuff, I've maybe only scratched the surface...

Generally I'm not a big fan of over-analysis and critiquing sf, not too closely anyway. I like to form my own opinions and just enjoy the story, but maybe I've been doing Lem a disservice.

Partly it's the fact that I'm stuck possibly missing a pile of cultural references no matter how much I dig - I have the same issue with Japanese sf particularly - some of it just gets lost in translation, some of it is drawing on a whole library of cultural refs and traditions I'm not aware of (and probably never will be without living it), some of it is just meant to be like that (eg: Haruki Murakami).

If you don't know exactly what you are looking for or how to recognise it or whether there is really something there at all - it's hard to know when to stop digging... especially perhaps when to do so is flying directly in the face of the "some stuff is just incomprehensible" message central to the book.

So, i'm going to maybe do a bit of reading around, but not sweat it too much, for fear of examining it too closely and breaking it , or taking the fun bit out of it.

I mean, Lem himself probably didn't put all those references in it intentionally. But, like me, he grew up in a certain cultural environment and kind of absorbed all those ideas and trends by "osmosis", so that stuff tends to show up in his works, since it's part of the fundamentals of his thinking.

So I read Solaris as a kid, am impressed, but don't / can't disentangle the whole hairball of references.

Years later I read Rudolf Otto's "The Idea of the Holy", where he defines the concept of divinity as that which is numinous - "a mystery that is both terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans) at the same time" (Wikipedia). Or as that which is ganz andere - wholly other, utterly different and incomprehensible and fascinating. And I'm like, hey, that sounds familiar somehow.

Then I read Borges, and Solaris comes back again, with the fictional but extensive "bibliographic references", the encyclopedic background of knowledge in that future universe, and so on.

Then I read Малыш (translated "Space Mowgli", but really should be just "The Kid") by the Strugatsky brothers, and the theme of the utterly incomprehensible alien is again looming large. And again with "Roadside Picnic", the most famous of their works. And again with "Definitely Maybe" and almost literally anything they wrote.

So it's not something you do on purpose. You read a book, put it aside and forget about it. And then later, reading something else, a beeper goes zing! in your brain. Sometimes it's just a coincidence, other times it's not. Often it's just all part of the big undifferentiated melting pot of ideas out there.

I was just having a dig through what there is available there seems a surprising amount of soviet era / eastern bloc stuff that doesn't seem to have ever been translated even, most of lem's stuff is around, and quite a lot, but not all of the strugatsky bros stuff. After that though it's very hit and miss for any other names I come up with.

I guess I'm going to have to rely on whatever got translated being the filtered best bits...frustrating though.

Thank you, yeah I guess it could apply to any of the translations. The 'timeless' point is a good one, I couldn't really have told you when it was written from either version to be honest, which I guess helps with certain types of scifi particularly.

We're kind of making the case for inserting a needless translation back and forth if you are going for a 'slightly wrong, slightly distant' feeling.

It would be interesting to hear what anyone who's read it in Polish thinks. Maybe there's a whole bunch of Polish Scifi readers out there wondering what the hell I'm banging on about, "what's he saying? it's the most straightforward and transparent and contemporary book I've ever read! the man's a fool!"

and yup, it's precisely that "Show, don't tell" approach that got me wondering what's there by design (and what's maybe unintended but worked well), I'm kind of veering more to the 'he totally meant to do that and the translations captured it pretty well tbh' , belief.

I read the previous version a long time ago and the new one when it was released. I don't remember the new version coming across as much better (probably because I loved the old version). However, I don't think anything is lost by a better translation. spoiler

Well it'd be interesting if what I think about the strangeness and vagueness still comes through from the way it's written rather than just the plot, does anything I'm saying ring bells, or did you not get the same 'lost and uncomfortable' feeling from it as me anyway?

I had a sort of creeped out feeling when his copy-wife (mark 1) started following him around the space station and sort of quietly went on a rampage. As for lost that would be the Monsters chapter for me, no idea what Lem was rambling on about half the time.

I really didn't find that chapter all that confusing. I found it boring, but as far as the descriptions, it read like, here are some of the strange phenomena we have observed. We have no idea why they do this, nor of the physics involved. Perhaps because I've been forced to read a lot of metaphysics (that I can't remember much of right now) in various philosophy classes, I'm kind of used to very dense passages that use a lot of words to say, in effect, "we don't know".